Hoping that someone is able to share some tips on how they make long , ambient pads on their cycles?
Besides from long decay and reverb, I am struggling to get a desired result…
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Did you try to apply slow LFO on any parameter? Modulate Sweep and Contour works fine for pads.
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not easy as M:C does not have an ADSR…you need sustain and release for long sounds like pad
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Been doing the LFO assigned to volume with a negative value around -30 or less. That plus a long decay is nice. You can live record other tweaks too for even more variety.
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Thank for the suggestions, the LFO on the sweep worked a treat!
So in the absence of an attack function, the only way to get a slow attack is to gradually turn volume up in live mode?
I don’t own a M:S but if the filter section has an envelope you could use that, set cutoff all the way open, env depth to negative with a slow decay
Not sure if this is what you’re looking for but a guy in another thread suggested to make a drone lay down a trig, engage the gate button. Then hold the trig. on the trig menu you can set the length to infinite. Now set the trig condition to “1st”. The note will fire at the beginning of the pattern and continue with a long drone. Now tweak till your heart’s content!
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Yep, that’s the only way. Or to use an external device that has LFOs (e.g. Digitakt) to add more functionality to the Cycles. That gets kinda cumbersome, though.
I find that it helps to add LOTS of reverb and set the REVERB SIZE to near-infinite. Especially for anything pad-like, the reverb really becomes an important sound design tool.
It’s also fun to experiment with other ambient sounds that have a slightly different character instead of trying to get the Cycles to do bread-and-butter pads. E.g. Chord machine, lots of random fast LFO to FTUNE or some other parameter, LFO reset and a fade out, through tons of reverb… That creates sounds with nice soft noise bursts in the beginning.
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you can use the LFO set to ENV and, as someone else pointed out, the vol/dist know set to a negative value to get a simulated slow attack value. this is how i do pads on M:C. let me know if this was confusing and I can try to upload a video at some point.
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• low contour values to get slower movement
• use note length and sustain to hold notes (combined with an attack lfo and decay length you can get interesting envelopes)
• push machines into their upper and lower maximums for pitch to find weird instabilities
• Tone at the lowest Color and values, Perc with a very low pitch and low values, and the chord machine in unison mode can all produce interesting natural modulation and movement from the machines themselves
• Metal with very low values becomes a weird unison synth itself, can only play high frequencies but can be a nice tone when you want unstable, glittery leads
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Another trick is to turn off the routing of the actual voice, then turn up the reverb so it’s the only thing audible, this gives a softer sound.
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How you do that?
Nice one / i missed that